The LDT program is innovative and on the cutting edge in terms of instructional design and learning practice at UGA. My first year in the Learning, Design, and Technology program at the University of Georgia has been fruitful. First of all, I want to present my gratitude to each and every LDT faculty member for helping me to build a strong ground in the field of LDT. It has been priceless to be a member of the LDT family and I have been feeling privileged about the quality of education that I am receiving, which would let me step into the career that I desire as a researcher.

 

Coursework

 

In the first semester, I grew my hard skills with EDIT 8190- LDT Design Studio. In addition to that, developing an artifact from the scratch increased my self-esteem, which I would never think that I was capable of in the first place. The course was very well organized and Dr. Rieber is one of the great instructors who did a great job in the delivery of the content.

 

EDIT 9990-Doctoral Topical Seminar course helped me a lot to understand the basics of the LDT field comparing with the Learning Sciences field. I am grateful to Dr. Kopcha for his continuous support, guidance, and in-depth knowledge that he has. I learnt how to be a critical thinker and all the feedbacks that I got from Dr. Kopcha always encouraged me to continue, particularly in the challenging moments.

 

The EDIT 8990- Seminar course delivered by Dr. Branch has been a great opportunity to share our concerns as beginner researchers.  I believe in the necessity of this course to decrease the level of anxiety in the case of getting off-track.

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EDIT 8100- Foundations in LDT, delivered by Dr. Hill builds my  strong foundation in terms of theories, scholars, and research methods in LDT field. Also, Dr. Hill also gave us face-to-face feedback about our research via zoom, which was really wonderful to encourage us to organize our ideas logically. 

 

EDIT 8290-Design-Based Research course increased my knowledge regarding what is the unique characteristics of DBR compared to other research methodology, how to conduct DBR in practice. I enjoyed the classroom discussion very much. Dr. Choi shared us much insights and views from his research practices, which inspired me to conduct design-based research. 

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Last but not least, Dr. Kopcha is one of the best advisors that I could ever think of. He has always inspired me with his wisdom in the field. He has never hesitated to spend his hours with me on intellectual discussions, which has a significant role in how I manage to situate myself with my research interest. Especially, Dr. Kopcha guided me through the data analysis to the  manuscript writing in my meta-analysis work. 

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Program Suggestion

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Add some more advanced educational technology courses

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Due to the very nature of the LDT program, it should integrated the cutting-edge educational technology. In my first year's learning in our LDT program,  our program did not offer any technology-related course. I would love to learn some programming languages and some technology skills. When everybody’s technology skills are almost as good as us, we probably need to have some additional technology skills.

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​       Self Assessment

The first year in the LDT Ph.D. program has been a life-changing experience. It has been full of achievements and disappointments. Being an international student, however, I have learnt the importance of embracing my failures as well as the achievements. This is the key to success.

 

First of all, it would not be wrong to say that it has been an academically productive year. All the course work I took in the two semesters build the foundation of my doctoral study. The LDT course led me to combine my previous teaching experience with the instructional design theories and methods. The statistic method courses, including ANOVA, Correlation and Regression, Rasch measurement, made me to conduct basic quantitative studies more successful.

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Dr. Kopcha and I worked on a meta-analysis review study to examine the moderator effect of pedagogy role on mobile learning effect in science education. We will submit a proposal to 2021 AECT. Additionally, we are working to write a journal article.: Understanding how pedagogy role moderators the effect of mobile technology on science learning achievement.  

 

In the past year, I self-learned a lot technology skills, which will contribute to my planed research. I finished one online data science course. I also learned how to use R to classify image data. Currently, I am taking some machine learning courses on DataCamp. 

 

Overall, I am satisfied with my first-year performance. Yet, this does not mean that I have never suffered. I have been through continuous fluctuations in my performance, in other words, motivational crisis. There have been times that I felt disappointed by the feedbacks that I received on my scholarly writing. Taking baby steps towards my goal, however, I have always been sure what I wanted at the end of the day. Therefore, I always find the courage to continue my path till become a highly qualified researcher. Accordingly, in the second year of the program, hopefully, I will continue to do what I desire as a  member of the LDT community.  

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